That sweet word: lustration
What Ancient Greek warriors used to do to keep up their morale, Roman shepherds to keep their flocks of sheep from illnesses, and priests to cleanse their flock from sins, is again in demand. Lustration! In our interpretation, this has made a giant leap from just ablution and fumigation. Now it is a multifaceted rite. It may mean dismissing bosses, dumping them into a garbage chute, and endless chats in public places about bad people.
We owe it to communist ideals that the Latin word “lustratio” has returned to modern vocabulary. To get rid of the chimeras of class prejudices and the supremacy of the state over man, the European countries that have had their share of socialism suddenly needed a process of cleansing. They have done and, in some cases, are still doing this from the Balkans to the Baltic southern coast, from eastern Germany to western Ukraine. Everywhere, this process has been accompanied by metal turmoil and intellectual ferment. For cleansing is about not so much people as pernicious ideologies and habits.
Decommunization, coupled with lustration, was the only way to switch from the fictional to the existing reality. For some reason, what has made a lasting impression on Ukrainian public opinion is the way the Czechs changed their ideology and governmental machine, although the 15-year-long Polish experience is more suitable for us. There are essential differences here.
Immediately after replacing the orthodox communist leaders in the 1990 free elections, the reformist team of Vaclav Havel and the Czech social movement passed a lustration law applicable to all the Communist Party functionaries who had been holding top offices since 1968. At the same time, Czechoslovakia smoothly broke up into two countries. As a matter of fact, most of those who opposed the compulsory change of elites were in Slovakia, where the old cadres were not dismissed outright. So the Czech Republic became a showpiece of the successful washout and cleansing of the establishment. In the first year of lustration, the descendants of Jan Hus and opponents of Gustav Husak dismissed 9,000 functionaries (according to a survey by the Sussex European Institute). By 2000, this process had involved 400,000 civil servants, military servicemen, and security officers.
Poland was giving up the old ways not so fast but as much resolutely. The Tadeusz Mazowiecki government, formed after the victory of Solidarity, also included some former Communists who, naturally, wanted to postpone the public debate on lustration. And although the Poles began to draw up – on the sly – a legal basis for the cleansing ritual, the end was not in sight. Some attempts were not successful. In 1991, the radical Jan Olszewski Cabinet launched a campaign to dismiss 64 members of parliament. The attempt triggered a stormy reaction in society, and Mr. Olszewski and his team themselves were fired.
Yet passions about the lustration were still running high, and Premier Jozef Oleksy was accused of being previously linked with the KGB and also lost his office in 1995. It was not until 1998 that the Poles managed to have the lustration law formally adopted. Under this law, more than 20,000 civil servants and security officials had been removed from Poland’s high and low offices by 2004.
The experience of lustration in those countries, as well as in Hungary, Romania, the former East Germany, Bulgaria, and Croatia can teach us some useful lessons. Here are the three basic ones:
FIRSTLY, cadres will not be updated unless cleansing is coupled with decommunization. Yesterday’s communist party and Komsomol colleagues will not clip each other’s wings in the new offices. Nor will the grassroots, still spellbound by the chimeras of socialism, be exactly bursting to live a new life.
SECONDLY, there should be a certain critical mass of reformers in the government, capable of applying the lustration law. Otherwise the process will boil down to mere declarations and stuffing some individuals into trash cans.
THIRDLY, the old security cadres are incapable of fulfilling new tasks, so the ultimate success is impossible unless the security service is drastically transformed. As long as security officers prefer kowtowing to topmost officials instead of serving the nation, there will only be bad results.
Ukraine is 15 years late, as far as governmental sanitation is concerned. What we should get rid of now is not only the old ideology and the Soviet-minded cadres. We must mow down the thick idealess weeds of corruption sown in the times of Leonid Kuchma, Viktor Yushchenko, Viktor Yanukovych, and perhaps Petro Poroshenko. It is not only more and more difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, but the state apparatus is running more and more risks of being completely discredited. Even now, this apparatus causes no fascination, and I am afraid that, after a thorough cleansing, there will be nobody but cleaning women left in the buildings with state emblems and uniform notice plates.
However, if you don’t wash your hair, this doesn’t mean you will lose your head. If society has endorsed the idea of cleansing, this will be done – of course, not by such methods when individual decisions are made to dismiss hundreds and thousands of people who served the previous tsar-president or when the whole central apparatus of government is manned by people from the same village, city, company of friends, or corporation. This only underlines the urgency of the lustration problem. Society can no longer stand crowd-pleasing speeches, irresponsibility on all the levels of power, and abysmal non-professionalism. For this reason, we all wish that there should be a legal regulator for governmental office appointments and that the appointees be answerable to society. All the Eastern European states, including the familiar Baltic countries, have the techniques and principles of a system like this. But we will not be able to borrow some things.
I asked some of my civil servant friends what associations the word “lustration” calls up in them. They all compared the process with the Inquisition and Stalin-era kangaroo courts – in other words, they put punitive functions and reprisals above all. This is where we differ from the Czechs and Poles. For them, lustration is a line between the old and the new systems of power, a set of requirements for the official and the politician. For us, by contrast, it is continuation of the old struggle against enemies and dissenters, for power, of some against the others. Of course, it is difficult for one when he or she has been deprived of the possibility to carve out a career. Many of my Czech friends, who had worked as journalists and military observers, lost their jobs in the state-run media overnight only because they had graduated from Soviet higher educational institutions, such as the Lviv Higher Military Political College’s Faculty of Journalism. But they continued their professional pursuit a year later in other fields such as private publishing houses and advertising agencies. Lustration did not make pariahs out of them – it only barred them from promotion at state-run establishments. It is unpleasant but not fatal.
Let us face it: many, both on the top and on the bottom, dislike the term “lustration.” But sociological surveys note that the majority of people do not mind if the officials’ work style, education, and culture meet Western standards (let the Presidential Academy forgive me). We like it when ministers ride to work on trams and bicycles, when the local authorities can email you a document, when many procedures become simplified and the state apparatus serves society rather than the boss who has privatized it, when children, who have just graduated from a university, do not rule big cities but continue to master step by step the profession of manager, when embezzlers in a high office are not replaced with clueless ones in a hope that they are decent. When… When… If this is the wish, there is no need for lustration. It is better then to exclusively appoint and elect Englishmen, Germans, and Frenchmen to all offices, beginning from the village council head, as it was done in the olden times, when serfdom hindered construction and development. But, as we are not in a position now to pay foreigners, we should not drop the idea of lustration – we should bring it up to the required, at least Romanian, level.
